Breathing life into my characters made me want to live fully again, and finishing the final draft gave me a profound sense of fulfilment
I was writing things about made-up people long before I was writing anything else. What drew me to fiction is still what motivates me now: a desire to understand people, their psychology, their motivations and their relationships. For me, writing has never been about catharsis. I don’t feel better about painful experiences having written them “out of my system”. It isn’t an emotional purging. It can feel pretty terrible sometimes, swimming in your own sadness, and it never feels better afterwards. The suggestion that an author’s characters are merely ciphers for their own mental state is most frequently levelled at female writers, so I feel compelled to say that none of the characters in my debut novel, The Tyranny of Lost Things, are me. And, of course, they all are, in some way, me.
I was very ill when I started writing it. I had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in 2010, and again in late 2015. It made life very difficult and there were times when I didn’t want to go on. I essentially became a recluse who rarely left the house (I was lucky to have been working as a freelance writer or I wouldn’t have been able to survive financially). I was swinging perpetually between terror and sadness, in a state of either fight-or-flight, or intense grief at the loss of a functional existence.
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